I Finished the Fractured Mirror! Seriously! I Promise!

An update on a book I have seemingly spent my entire life writing.

For the past five months or so, I have ended tele-sessions with my therapist by stating that I hope to have finished The Fractured Mirror, a massive exploration of American movies about filmmaking, by the next week.

Depending on how you count, I have been working on the Fractured Mirror book for three to ten years. It began as a column on the late, lamented TCM Backlot in 2015, not long after I was laid off from The Dissolve.

When TCM Backlot went out of business in 2021, my wonderful editor, Yacov Freedman, gave me permission to continue the column on my website and turn it into a book.

I had written sixty or seventy entries by that point, covering many of the most essential movies on the subject. I thought that I had written much of the book already. As is almost invariably the case, I was wrong! Oh, sweet blessed Lord, was I ever wrong!

I thought that I'd cover maybe 300 movies for the book. In the Fractured Mirror Kickstarter page, I gave myself eighteen months to finish and publish The Fractured Mirror. I was, once again, spectacularly wrong on both counts.

In my obsessive survey of movies about movies, I ended up covering well over five hundred films. I wanted to publish by the 2024 holiday season. Instead, I merely began the process of finishing the book last year.

I have now spent well over a year finishing The Fractured Mirror. I am not exaggerating when I say that at this point, I have done twenty-four drafts of a 548-page book. At the end of each draft, I find myself thinking that I love my book but that it could be better. It could be more exhaustive, tighter, more professional, and less repetitive.

My endless, obsessive work on The Fractured Mirror puts the "labor" in "labor of love."

It's taken a seeming eternity, but after reading the paperback proof of The Fractured Mirror, I found myself thinking, "This is fucking great and it honestly couldn't be better."

When I receive the next/last draft of the book from my brilliant book designer, Mariana, I will press the magical "publish paperback" button, hoping to publish the book on November 26th, in time for Black Friday and the holiday season. I wanted to publish it on my wife's birthday, the 19th, but that proved overly ambitious.

Publishing a book is a bipolar experience, even if you’re not bipolar. You alternate between manic highs and agonizing lows. Your book is either going to be rapturously received as a gift to humanity by adoring readers or angrily rejected by the universe.

The anxiety and neuroses increase the closer you get to the all-important publication date. I am, consequently, a total fucking basket case right now.

It took me less than a year to write The Big Rewind, my 2009 literary debut. It's taken me considerably longer to finish The Fractured Mirror because I am all too aware of my weaknesses as a writer. I can be messy. I can be sloppy. I have an astonishingly poor grasp of grammar, considering I have been writing professionally for nearly three decades. "Weird Al" Yankovic was kind enough to write an introduction for The Weird Accordion to Al, my 2020 guide to his life's work that dealt extensively with my unfortunate predilection toward word crimes.

I was ruthless with myself in editing The Fractured Mirror. I cut everything that was not absolutely necessary. Repetition became my mortal enemy.

I wanted to create a book that justified the enormous time and energy that I put into it. That set the bar high because I have invested a pathological amount of effort into a book where the entries are all 150 to 250 words.

You have to be very economical to write a 250-word blurb on, say, Sunset Boulevard that does justice to what I consider the greatest movie about filmmaking ever made, but The Fractured Mirror has a leanness lacking from the rest of my work.

In the past few months, things have really come together for The Fractured Mirror. In one of the all-time highlights of my life and career, I got Joe Dante, the legendary director of Hollywood Boulevard, Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins, The Burbs, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, and Matinee, to write the foreword.

It was an incredible honor to have one of my all-time favorite filmmakers wax rhapsodic about my writing.

While writing and researching The Fractured Mirror, I found myself thinking that many of the movies I write about in it seem made up. So I thought it might be interesting to have favorite podcasters from my favorite bad movie podcasts write blurbs for movies that exist only in their fertile imaginations.

The first podcaster that I asked was Dan McCoy, who has been very kind to me and pointed out that I was following in the footsteps of Michael and Harry Medved's seminal bad movie manifesto, The Golden Turkey Awards, which featured an entry on Dog of Norway, a fictitious vehicle for "Muki the Wonder Hound." I then reconceived my idea as a loving homage rather than a shameless rip-off.

I was fortunate enough to receive additional blurbs from Paul Scheer of How Did This Get Made? and Andrew Jupin from We Hate Movies, along with author Mike Sacks, who has written multiple books about movies that do not exist, but should.

My book contains contributions from the director of Piranha and the star of Piranha 3DD. I'm hoping to get a blurb from the director of 1982’s Piranha 2: The Spawning. That shouldn't be difficult. That movie wasn't even that successful.

Because I've devoted so much time and energy to The Fractured Mirror, I haven't been able to give Nathan Rabin's Happy Place the time and energy that it deserves. We neurodivergent folks aren't great at time management. This site has suffered. I apologize for that.

I hope that when readers of this website read The Fractured Mirror, they’ll be amazed that I had the time and energy to do anything other than write such a massive tome, let alone continue to write a personal website and Substack newsletter.

After the publication of The Fractured Mirror, I plan to recommit myself to Nathan Rabin's Happy Place. I haven't published anywhere near the pace I would like. This site has never had a particularly large readership, and many of my casual readers seem to have wandered away during the time I've been focusing on The Fractured Mirror and my Substack newsletter, Nathan Rabin's Bad Ideas, which has grown in a way that this site stubbornly has not.

I wish I had a way of writing books that did not involve paralyzing anxiety, psychodrama, self-doubt, and all-consuming fear. Then again, I wish I knew how to live in a way that did not involve paralyzing anxiety, psychodrama, self-doubt, and all-consuming fear.

Writing The Fractured Mirror was a profoundly anti-social, solitary experience. It entailed watching a massive number of movies for a project that required an enormous amount of work, yet wouldn't yield dividends for years.

Now I'm excited to share my book with the world. Talking to strangers generally fills me with terror. That's one of the many reasons I've struggled emotionally, financially, and professionally over the past decade as a full-time freelancer. Talking to strangers about The Fractured Mirror, on the other hand, fills me with excitement.

I could not be prouder of The Fractured Mirror. You did a heckuva job, Natey. I'm going to pat myself on the back.

Like many neurodivergent individuals, I tend to start books, columns, projects, and podcasts that I often do not finish. I am easily distracted and discouraged, so a big part of the excitement I'm feeling now is the joy of completion.

I fucking did it. There were times when I worried that I would never finish or publish The Fractured Mirror, but I did. I fucking did it. I wrote something exhaustive and immersive that's twice as long as the average book, tackling over a century of scintillating cinema.

It's a book that will appeal to everybody who loves movies, just as The Weird Accordion to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al succeeded commercially and creatively because they appealed to "Weird Al" Yankovic's loyal, large following, rather than my infinitely smaller fan base.

Please consider pre-ordering The Fractured Mirror through this store's shop, which my brilliant sister-in-law, Romy, helped me revamp to make it professional and sleek. I've also signed up for Stamps.com, so I can send books to you in a sane and efficient manner, rather than being a self-defeating lunatic who fills postal employees with rage by stumbling into the post office with 17 unwieldy packages that need to be shipped the old-fashioned way.

At the risk of ending this with a very strange humblebrag, I was pretty depressed throughout the entire process of researching and writing The Fractured Mirror. Yet that ultimately worked in its favor. I did not necessarily have the resources or self-belief to write 3000-word essays, but I could write the fuck out of a 200-word blurb for a shitty movie about movies.

I love what I do. I also don't know how to do anything else. It's not like I have to choose between being a perpetually broke, frustrated freelance writer and pursuing a career in brain surgery. I like having finished the work even more.

I finally finished The Fractured Mirror. Yet in a sense, my work has only just begun. I hope I do as good a job promoting The Fractured Mirror as I did writing it, but, at the risk of being immodest, that's setting the bar awfully high.

Pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop